Looking for a friend
by Couldn'tComeUpWithAUsername
Summary: Takes place right before How to train your dragon 3. Basically a rewrite of the third movie, but with the introduction of an OC character. First of the three planned stories in the 'looking' series, and my first real fanfic, not counting a miserable first attempt called 'Looking for a home' that will eventually be rewritten into the third book.
1. Chapter 1

Hiccup was eating dinner in the crowded great hall of Berk. He was enjoying a rare moment of peace, because usually if he showed his face in public, there would be a dozen angry vikings who's problems and disputes needed his attention. Such was the life of a chief. Toothless, who was now an alpha, was also enjoying a rare moment of quiet. He had spotted a glowing dot on the floor and pounced on it, knocking over several drinks and plates of food.

The nearby vikings who had lost their food because of the playful dragon looked at Hiccup, and were about to complain to him about having dragons in the great hall. Again. Hiccup shrugged and pointed at Toothless, who was still hunting the glowing dot. "Take it up with him." Hiccup said.

The disgruntled vikings looked like they were about to, then realized that they had been told to argue with a nightfury, over something as petty as a dinner that was free anyway. They walked away while they still had some dignity left. "You know bud." Hiccup joked "I may have the easiest job of any chief ever. If anyone wants to argue with me, they can talk to the unholy offspring of lightning and death itself."

Toothless was flattered that his friend thought he was so scary, and he held up his head and struck what in his mind was a very regal pose. Then his front paw slipped on one of the plates he had knocked over earlier, and he faceplanted onto the nearest pillar. Hiccup laughed, and Toothless snorted and went back to hunting his glowing dot.

But their was something strange about this dot. Any respectable nightfury knows that all mysterious glowing dots should move around and eventually disappear. But this dot was staying still. And getting bigger. And brighter. Not wanting to waste any time, Toothless used his exceptional hearing to locate Hiccup by the distinctive sounds his prosthetic leg made, and used his tail to pull Hiccup over to him, without having to turn around.

"Woah bud! What's going on?" Hiccup said as a familiar tail grabbed him out of nowhere and pulled him over to it's owner. Then he saw the dot. "Oh." Hiccup said. "What is that?" He had never seen anything like it. The dot had expanded to the size of a dinner plate, and was still getting bigger. It had ghostly transparent yellow flames swirling around the outside edge, and when it got to its full width of three feet the swirling flames got brighter and less transparent and reached seven feet up into the air. Then four seconds after it had started, the whole glowing circle disappeared to reveal a man standing inside.

_'A teenager actually.'_ Toothless Thought. '_He looked about sixteen. And he smelled like... lightning. Like a skrill.' _Immediately more wary, Toothless began aiming a shot at the stranger. Hiccup was shocked that Toothless had reacted to the man like that, even if he had arrived very strangely. He jumped in between Toothless and the stranger and tried to get him to calm down. Toothless roughly shoved Hiccup out of the way with his head and fired a medium sized plasma blast, definitely big enough to kill a man.

The shot hit the stranger squarely in the chest, and the explosion was loud enough to get the attention of anybody that had missed the strangers dramatic entrance. When the explosion cleared, everyone was shocked to see the man still standing there, calmly brushing some dust that had been dislodged from the rafters off of his shoulder.

"I allowed you that shot, so you understood it wouldn't work. Shoot me again and you pay for it." The man said, speaking mostly to Toothless, who nodded in agreement. Hiccup stood up again, amazed that without any armor on, that man had been able to survive a blast much bigger than the one that had killed his father.

"Anyone who can stand there and make threats to a nightfury, that also happens to be the alpha of all dragons, must at least have an interesting story to tell." Hiccup said, trying to defuse the situation somewhat. "Why don't you come to my house with me, and you can tell me why you're here." Then Hiccup turned to Astrid, who had been forcing her way through the crowd with her axe in her hands, ready to use it if necessary.

"Can you round up the rest of the gang and meet us at my house?" Hiccup asked. Astrid smiled, gave him a mock salute, and began forcing her way through the crowd again to find the rest of their friends. "I figured you would only want to tell us your story once." Hiccup said to the stranger as they exited the great hall, behind Toothless, whose presence had easily cleared a path for them through the crowd of vikings. "What is your, name by the way?" Hiccup asked him as they climbed the steps to his house in the near total darkness of a winter night in Berk.

"Dylan." The stranger responded. Hiccup realized that this conversation was probably as distracted as the stranger was going to get. Hiccup nodded to Toothless, who suddenly spun around, pinned Dylan to the ground, and roared. That was the signal for the rest of the dragon riders, who had all practiced and used this interrogation plan before. they all came out of their hiding spots and stood in a circle around Hiccup, Dylan, and Toothless. Then their dragons, who had also heard the signal flew from where they were hiding nearby and landed behind their riders, completing the trap.

**Well, there's the first chapter. I plan to update every Friday.**


	2. Chapter 2

Dylan had let Toothless pin him to the ground without a fight, and had waited calmly while the dragon riders completed their trap. Once they were done, Dylan lifted Toothless off of him with one hand, and then used both hands to roughly slam him headfirst into the nearest house, knocking him out for at least a few minutes.

Not many things could make Hiccup truly angry, but hurting a dragon was one of them. And this stranger had just hurt Toothless, who was almost like a brother to him. Without even thinking, Hiccup reached for his sword and ignited the monstrous nightmare gel. He closed the distance between him and Dylan in half a second, and wildly swung his sword, hitting Dylan on the side of the head.

He was rewarded with a feeling similar to hitting a boulder with a metal baseball bat. The sword scraped across Dylan's skin with a screeching sound, and didn't even leave a scratch. Then Hiccup's arm went numb from the shock and he dropped his sword to the ground, which lay there, bent, cracked, dull, and still burning.

Dylan just stood there and sighed, disappointed at how badly his first half hour in this universe had gone. "I thought I had found somebody that was willing to talk first and shoot later." Dylan said to himself. "I guess I'll just move on now." At that moment, Toothless woke up and saw Hiccup holding his arm like he'd been hurt, and remembered who had knocked him out. Toothless turned to face Dylan and built up a plasma blast as big as the one he had used on the bewilderbeast.

Hiccup saw the spikes on Toothless's back start to glow, and realized what he was about to do. "No Toothless!" Hiccup shouted, but it was too late. Toothless had already built up a massive fireball, and it had to go somewhere. The dragon riders threw themselves to the ground, desperate to shield themselves from the oncoming explosion, and their dragons covered them with their much more fireproof wings.

Hiccup had no dragon to shield him from the blast, and could only stand and watch as Toothless launched the biggest fire ball he had ever seen. This shot should have been big enough to annihilate Dylan, Hiccup, and several nearby buildings. All Hiccup had time to do before the fireball hit Dylan was to realize that he was going to die in the same way as his father, accidentally shot by Toothless. But instead, Dylan caught the fireball _in his bare hand _and just crushed it until it fizzled out without exploding.

"All of you stop!" Dylan said. "Seriously, for your own good, you should really stop."

"What now?" Hiccup asked. "As soon as _you_ showed up in _our home,_ _you've_ just been making threats to us. If that's all you do, I don't think we really need to be afraid of you."

"Of course not." Dylan said. "I wouldn't consider hurting you just for trying, and failing miserably, to hurt me." Then he looked up at the sky behind the riders and said. "But he might." As soon as he spoke, the whole village heard the characteristic screeching sound of a diving night fury. All the dragon riders looked up to the night sky, but because it wasn't building up a shot, they couldn't see anything against the dark sky, and they were very startled when a night fury that was noticeably bigger and scarier looking than Toothless landed almost silently next to Dylan.

Dylan scratched the dragon under the chin, and he warbled contentedly, then he remembered why he had intervened in the first place, and roared at the riders and their dragons, loud enough to make plates and silverware in the great hall shake. Even Toothless looked subdued afterwards, and apologized to the larger dragon.

Dylan was able to understand their brief conversation, because with a lot of determination and pure luck he had built a dragon translator, and then figured out a way to connect it to his auditory nerve, and implanted it behind his ear.

"Now are you willing to listen to me?" Dylan asked.

"Alright." Hiccup said, still kind of shocked. "We won't actually all fit in my house. Let's go back to the great hall."

A minute later, they were seated comfortably in the great hall, which was nearly empty because of how late it was. The few remaining occupants were mostly too tired or drunk to notice the second night fury, most of them that did just assumed they were seeing double and decided that they had enough mead for the night and left.

That left only Gobber, who walked over to the group and asked "Who's the new guy chief?"

"I'm surprised you're not more interested in the new dragon." Hiccup said.

"New dragon?" Gobber said as he looked around. "Where?"

"Behind you." Astrid supplied helpfully.

Gobber whirled around to see the Dylan leaning up against the wall in a particularly dark shadow. Then the shadowy lump grew a head with blue eyes, and Gobber could see that Dylan was actually leaning up against a new night fury.

"Hello there." Gobber said somewhat nervously. "What's your name?"

"I'm Dylan." Dylan said. "And this is Shadow." Shadow waved his tail in what was obviously a human greeting. The riders were impressed, and Toothless began practicing to wave with his tail too.

"Good name." Gobber said. "I can't imagine how you thought of it."

"Why do you always introduce yourself first?" Shadow said to Dylan.

"When you learn to talk, you can introduce us however you want." Dylan responded out loud. The riders had only seen Shadow tilt his head and make an annoyed snort, so they assumed he was just holding a mostly one sided conversation with his dragon like they did. Toothless however, had heard Dylan respond directly to what Shadow had said.

"He can understand us?" Toothless asked. "How?"

"The things behind my ears." Dylan said, confusing the dragon riders even more, because they had no idea who he was talking to. Seeing the confused look on their faces, Dylan explained. "Toothless asked me how I was able to understand him.

"You can understand dragons?" Hiccup asked. "How?"

"That's a _long _story." Dylan said.

"Oh god, here he goes again." Shadow said. "He's about to tell his whole life story."

"Just go to sleep." Toothless responded. "It's what I do when Hiccup starts telling me about his inventions."

Ignoring the two night furies, Dylan began to tell his story.


	3. Chapter 3

**I apologize for the late chapter, but I just got back from camping with no cell service, so here's chapter three.**

Sitting on the floor in the great hall with his back against Shadow's chest, Dylan was about to tell the riders their story, when he was interrupted by Tuffnut.

"Does you story involve blood and destruction?" Tuff asked. "Because if it doesn't I'm leaving."

"Of course it does." His twin sister Ruffnut said. "He rides a night fury, carries a cool sword, and clearly outsmarted Hiccup."

"But how do we know that all that is not just for show?" Tuff argued. "Maybe he's never even been in a real fight before."

"Did you see how quickly he knocked out Toothless with his bare hands?" Ruff countered "He didn't even use the pressure point. And he survived multiple plasma blasts to the face."

While the twins argued about him, Dylan turned to Hiccup and asked "Are they always like this?"

"Sometimes they're worse." Hiccup said. "Right now they're having one of their more logical debates. Sometimes they just spit out nonsense."

Dylan looked back at the twins, who were still arguing about him. "How long will they keep this up?" Dylan asked.

"Indefinitely." Hiccup said.

Dylan patted Shadow's head, and his eyes snapped open instantly from the nap he had been taking. "Would you mind shutting them up?" Dylan asked his dragon.

"With pleasure." The night fury responded. Shadow opened his mouth, unsheathed his teeth, and started up his alpha glow, which surprised Hiccup and Toothless, because Toothless had little control over when that happened. Their train of thoughts was interrupted by the loudest night fury roar they had ever heard, which actually shook the wooden tables of the great hall and the wooden frames of some of the nearby houses.

The dragon riders were sunned, bu snapped out of heir shock when the roar woke Snotlout, who had been sleeping on a bench and fell face first onto the floor, but it also silenced the twins, until Tuff interrupted again and asked "Why can Shadow do the glowy thing whenever he wants, but Toothless can only do it when Hiccup's in trouble?"

"I'll explain all of that and more if you and your sister would kindly shut up and let me tell our story." Dylan said. Then he looked at his watch, which had already synced to Berk time. "It's getting fairly close to dawn." He said, and Hiccup added his watch to the mental list of things he had to ask Dylan about.

"Then tell us already and make it fast." A very agitated and tired Snotlout said.

"Thank you." Dylan said. "I grew up in a normal house, outside of a huge city called New York. By huge, I mean that almost nine million people lived in just that city."

"That's more then the whole archipelago!" Fishlegs said excitedly.

"The total population of our world is about seven and a half billion people." Dylan said. "We're a lot further ahead of you as far as technology." Dylan pulled his phone out of his pocket, unlocked it, and let the dragon riders pass it around and play with it. "But." Dylan continued "We are behind you in one aspect though. We don't have any dragons."

"What do you mean, you don't have any dragons?" Hiccup asked.

"What exactly does that mean?" Fishlegs asked. "Did they disappear? Did they never exist? Or did you... kill them."

"I'm pretty sure they never existed at all." Dylan said. "If they did, they would have left behind teeth, bones, something to show they existed. but we have never found anything. We do have stories about them though, for some reason. All over the world, many different cultures have stories about something that never existed. It's strange. But, I'll get back to that in a minute."

"My father was an officer in our country's army." Dylan said. "My older brother followed in his footsteps, joined the army, and became an even higher ranking officer than my father was. I really wasn't sure what I was going to do, so I moved out of my parents house, got a job at a store, and worked on my inventions in my spare time like I always had."

"You're an inventor too?" Hiccup asked.

"More for fun than out of necessity, but yes." Dylan answered.

"Oh Thor, now we've got two of them." Snotlout said.

"Have you ever had to jump off a cliff to save him from one of his inventions?" Toothless asked.

"Not yet." Shadow answered. "How did that happen?"

"He was trying to fly on his own." Toothless said.

"Did it work?" Dylan asked, startling the dragon riders before they realized he was talking to a dragon again.

"After several brushes with death, yes." Toothless answered.

"You really have to get us some of those machine things." Snotlout said. "Who knows what Hookfang says about me behind my back."

"Soon I'll be able to say it to your face." Hookfang said, making all the dragons, and Dylan, laugh.

"I would." Dylan said. "But I'm not sure how long I'm going to be stuck here telling this story. Please save all your questions until I finish."

"One day I was fooling around with one of my favorite projects, a machine that can think like a person, something we call AI." Dylan said. "I'd gotten it to do simple stuff that had already been figured out, but I wanted to go further than that, and make it a real, self aware, person."

I never thought I would actually get anywhere with that," Dylan said "because there were a lot of teams of much smarter and more experienced people than me out there working on the same thing. But one day, I turned it on, and it actually worked!"

"I made a lot of copies of the AI, and sold them for a lot of money, to a whole bunch of different large tech companies and governments that wanted to use it for something or other. I kept one for myself, and used my new money to build myself a huge house and made a much larger and more powerful machine for the AI to run in."

"Because I no longer needed a job, considering I still had more money than several small countries, I hade a lot of free time. I bought a new invention called a quantum computer which is so ridiculously strange an d complicated I'm not even going to explain what it is. Than I realized that the basic idea of the quantum computer, using matter to create signals, could be reversed to use signals, from the AI, to control matter." Dylan said. "Basically I made the AI into a god."

"At that point, I realized that I did not need anything I had anymore." Dylan said. "I donated all of my money to various charities, and lived off the AI. If I wanted food, I told the AI to create some food. If I wanted new clothes, I told it to make me some clothes. But due to the weirdness of quantum computers I hugely miscalculated the maximum size of what I could have the AI create. One day I was bored, and asked it to make me something called a tank."

"We know what a tank is." Snotlout interrupted. "What kind of idiots does he think we are?"

"Not the kind of tank you're thinking of Snotlout." Dylan said. "I'll show you one someday. Well, actually just imagine a wagon, covered in thick metal armor, full of weapons that could easily wreck your entire village, and a machine inside that lets it move on it's own."

"That sounds pretty amazing." Hiccup said "Wait, how did you know Snotlout's name? Nobody told you his name."

"The dragons handled introductions." Dylan said. "They have a lot better manners then you do apparently. You're still trying to find out if I am the thief you're looking for. I'm not, he left Berk four hours ago on a boat headed for Outcast Island.

"Well then Dylan." Hiccup said. "It doesn't look like we're getting any sleep tonight. Why don't we go track down this boat of yours, and you can tell the rest of your story on the way. If it turns out that you're telling the truth, you can consider yourself invited to be a member of the dragon riders."

"Fine by me." Dylan said. "I don't need sleep."

"I do." Shadow said.

"Alright gang." Hiccup said "Saddle up. We're heading to outcast island."


End file.
